Letters | Kennedy Helm, health care, liberals and guns

Helm's contributions

On Friday, our community lost a great leader in Kennedy Helm. While Saturday's article on Kennedy did a good job of describing his personal accomplishments, it left out the significant and continuing impact that Kennedy made through his mentoring, training, and inspiring three generations of attorneys, friends and community leaders.

Kennedy counseled his mentees on the importance of making a positive impact on our world. His mentees accepted this challenge, and over the last 20 years they have served in leadership positions for such causes and institutions as the Center for Women and Families, the March of Dimes, the Premature and Sick Infants Fund, Legal Aid, the University of Louisville, Spalding University, the Kentucky Governor's Scholars Program, the Kentucky Science Center, and the Kentucky Bioalliance, just to name a few.

Kennedy's impact went far beyond his personal accomplishments, and his influence will continue far into the future. Kennedy's life serves as a challenge to each of us to invest in and inspire the next generation to continue his legacy of service. Kennedy was a dear friend and I will miss him.

ANDY BESHEAR

Louisville 40202

Health care for all

Humana's sponsorship of Actors Theatre's Festival of New Plays is unsettling to me. Why? Health insurance companies make profit for their shareholders in the following ways: by tightening administrative expenses, by restricting benefits, by refusing to insure bad risks, by steadily raising premiums, co-pays and deductibles and by denying claims.

A personal example: My friend Cheryl was a healthy young bicyclist with a successful legal career. She got leukemia. With treatment she went into remission. But, while waiting for insurance company approval to pay for a curative bone marrow transplant at M.D. Anderson Hospital in Texas (more about M.D. Anderson in Time magazine, March 4), her leukemia relapsed, and she died.

Health care in this country is now a commercial enterprise, a way to get rich from the suffering of others. Personal tragedies lie especially at the feet of health insurance companies. Knowing the deep suffering caused by this broken system, we can understand that health insurance company underwriting of arts and civic projects, even though well-intended, is problematic. Some day, like other developed countries, we will have publicly funded national health insurance. Everyone will have high quality, affordable health care and no moral dilemmas about financing the arts.

DR. GARRETT ADAMS, MD, MPH

Louisville 40206

Good is not bad

As a Christian I believe that I am to lead a quiet, lawful life and render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's; but sometimes I read the paper or watch TV and you liberals are more than I think I can bear.

Every day, the CJ has something about how they and their letter-writers hate God, goodness, Republicans, and conservative values. The TV is filled with the filth of liberal writers, and the TV news is absolutely venomous with hatred toward God, goodness, Republicans, and conservatism.

The worst part is that the more your hatred and filth are spread the more they get accepted; you know about how the more you lie, the more it gets believed. Even in Wednesday's paper was an article stating that Mayor Fischer was urging the governor to veto HB 279 because it allowed people to obey God before they obeyed government, and Satan forbid that we should have that. Are you not proud of a leader like this? You jugheads elected him!

We are not the bad people. Right is not wrong and good is not bad. I urge any decent people who still take this paper to teach our young people about these people, how not to be taken in by them, and how to pray for them. And may God grant us the grace not to hate them as they hate us.

TOM WHITE

La Grange, Ky. 40031

Gun pledge

Overheard in Congress: I pledge allegiance to the National Rifle Association, and to the gun manufacturers for which they stand, one nation under Wayne LaPierre, with assault rifles and high-capacity ammo clips for all.

EVERETT HOFFMAN

Louisville 40205

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Letters | Kennedy Helm, health care, liberals and guns

On Friday, our community lost a great leader in Kennedy Helm. While Saturday?s article on Kennedy did a good job of describing his personal accomplishments, it left out the significant and continuing